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There’s a different kind of Moss taking over the runway: the fuzzy green one you typically find on the forest floor.
This month, the Miu Miu, Hermès, and Louis Vuitton shows in Paris all featured set designs that incorporated moss or grass. At London Fashion Week, the Thevxlley fall 2026 show by Daniel del Valle—who is a florist by day—featured a breastplate-style top adorned with plants, like a wearable terrarium. Some of the greenery was real, while some was artificial. Meanwhile, the Vuitton “neo-landscape” was designed by Severance production designer Jeremy Hindle, lending it an uncanny quality.
All of this vegetation may be a sign, as some online have joked, that we’re feeling a collectsive urge to “touch grass,” or log off and spend time outside. It could also be an attempt to create a whimsical approximation of the real world, like a living playground. Either way, fashion’s green thumb is on full display. Of course, as Vogue’s senior archive editor Laird Borrelli-Persson tells me, this is far from the first time that a designer has set their show among the wild flora.
To name a few: Chanel’s spring 2010 show was set in a barn, with models walking on grass and hay (“a romp in the hay,” indeed). For Dries Van Noten’s spring 2015 show, models walked on a carpet by the Argentinean artist Alexandra Kehayoglou, specially made to look like a mossy forest floor. Dior built an elaborate garden maze for their spring 2017 couture show, and Collina Strada held its spring 2022 show at the Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop farm.
These days, fashion designers aren’t the only ones with moss on their minds, however. In recent years, moss seems to be a, well, growing trend in floral, interior, and landscape design, too. Where it was once seen by many as a backyard nuisance, it’s now being included as an intentional part of gardens, as people incorporate it into interior decor with moss rugs (both real plant and textile) or art forms like Kokedama (Japanese moss balls).
“Moss is definitely having a moment,” says floral designer Brittany Asch, the founder of Brrch, who has made work for Adele, Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty 2018 fashion show in New York, Mansur Gavriel, Glossier, Sandy Liang, Gucci, and more.
“I’ve worked with moss a lot over the years, more so in set work than single arrangements; building a forest landscape, a contained mountain, or a memory of both. I’ve used it in place of a table linen too,” Asch tells Vogue. “I work with moss to create grounding and a call back to the earth. It’s a primal echo. My dream garden is one filled with moss, and I feel an immediate sense of peace witnessing, being surrounded by, and or handling it.”
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Landscape architect Marissa Angell echoes the sentiment that moss is a quietly powerful presence wherever it is found (and it is all over the world, she notes, with more than 12,000 known species). For Angell, the plant brings to mind Japanese gardens, which she says make moss a “protagonist.”
“Moss is a plant that just takes a really long time to mature and spread,” Angell says. “So the use of that plant encourages us to reflect on any and all kinds of existential quandaries that we have as humans.” Angell notes that the fashion world drawing inspiration from nature is nothing new, but that the interest in plants (including moss) does seem to be on the rise lately. “Our natural resources are imperiled, and I think people are leaning into this idea of biophilia, which is an innate drive toward nature.” Angell’s work focuses on gardens and landscapes that work with nature, instead of trying to overly shape or control it.
She adds that moss has long been a material of interest for artists, citing Olafur Eliasson’s “Moss wall (1994)” at Tate Modern, Meg Webster’s moss carpets, and Lily Kwong’s sculptural moss in Grand Central as examples. It has a textile-like quality that is appealing, she says. Also, it’s simply cool. Moss “adds this layer of mystery” and “gives this patina of time, where there isn’t one,” she says.
Both Angell and Asch also point to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, as a major influence on how they think about moss. Angell points to Kimmerer’s description of moss as “forests in miniature” and connects that idea to fashion: “So much of fashion is about providing a microcosm of an attitude or feeling and consolidating that into just a few looks.” Ironically, Angell says, moss doesn’t tolerate a lot of foot traffic. She wonders about the fate of the moss, hoping that it was sustainably harvested and not left to die after fashion week.
So, can we confidently say that moss is having a moment? “Moss will always be having a moment,” Asch says. “Whether that includes our human intervention or not.”
